States Fight to Protect Students From For-Profit Schools

Maura Healey, the Massachusetts attorney general, at a news conference in Boston in January.CreditCreditBrian Snyder/Reuters

Long before the federal government roused itself, individual state governments were fighting to bring discipline to an unruly and untrustworthy corner of the educational market — for-profit schools that saddle students with crushing debt in exchange for degrees that are essentially useless.

The states are still fighting the good fight: In a lawsuit filed last week in Federal District Court in Washington, attorneys general from 19 states and the District of Columbia served notice that they will resist any attempt by the Trump administration to weaken or ignore hard-won regulations that protect students and taxpayers from predatory schools.

One such attempt has already been identified. This spring, the Education Department abruptly suspended federal rules that allow students who have been defrauded by colleges to have their federal loans forgiven. The state coalition, led by Attorney General Maura Healey of Massachusetts, says that in so doing the department broke the law. The suit asks the court to declare the action illegal and to order the department to implement the rule without delay.

The idea of compensating borrowers when schools mislead or defraud them dates back to the 1970s, when federal officials saw that some colleges were looting the federal student aid program while giving students nothing in return. In 1993, Congress ordered the secretary of education to develop a process allowing defrauded students to seek loan forgiveness. The Obama administration streamlined the process after the collapse and bankruptcy, in 2014, of the giant for-profit chain Corinthian, which left thousands of students mired in debt and without degrees.

The Obama administration took other important steps. It required schools to provide students with clear information about whether their graduates were earning enough money to pay down their loans. Most crucially, it made sure that schools — not taxpayers — would foot the bill for discharging the loans of students who had been defrauded.

The rules were completed last fall, after years of negotiations and a review of more than 10,000 comments from students, colleges, government officials and consumer advocates. But shortly after the Trump administration took office, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos put the most important changes on hold. Ms. DeVos said she was responding to a suit filed by an association representing for-profit colleges, which have fought to block the rules. But the attorneys general believe the move is a natural extension of the department’s new open-door policy toward the for-profit industry.

The Department of Education is free to change these rules, but only if it writes new ones in a process laid out in federal law that could take a year or more to run its course. Meanwhile, the court should require the department to enforce the rules that are already on the books.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: States Stand Up to For-Profit Schools. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe